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From Inkscape to poppler

Dec 31, 2021

10 min #rust · #ffi · #pdf · #svg · #ftl-infra

What’s next? Well… poppler is the library Inkscape uses to import PDFs.

Cool Bear's hot tip

Yes, the name comes from Futurama.

Turns out, poppler comes with a bunch of CLI tools, including pdftocairo!

Halfway through this article, I realized the “regular weight” on my system was in fact Iosevka SS01 (Andale Mono Style) (see Releases), but the “bold weight” was the default Iosevka.

GDB scripting and Indirect functions

Feb 27, 2020

41 min #rust · #gdb · #nom

In the last article, we cleaned up our dynamic linker a little. We even implemented the Dynamic relocation.

But it’s still pretty far away from running real-world applications.

Let’s try running a simple C application with it:



// in `samples/puts.c`

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    puts("Hello from C");
    return 0;
}



$ cd samples/
$ gcc puts.c -o puts
$ ../target/debug/elk ./puts
Loading "/home/amos/ftl/elk/samples/puts"
Loading "/usr/lib/libc-2.32.so"
Fatal error: Could not read symbols from ELF object: Parsing error: String("Unknown SymType 10 (0xa)"):
input: 1a 00 10 00 a0 bf 0b 00 00 00 00 00 c1 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The Choice Ep. 1: Debriefing

May 31, 2013

4 min #perspective · #gamedev · #thechoice

To the programmers

It’s too easy! Where’s the documentation for the API? I found an injection vulnerability! Global functions from ‘window’ leak! I tried to attack your server then realized nginx was ignoring me!

Keep struggling, my pretties. The game is not meant for you, but you are good guinea pigs nonetheless. Just because the game involved programming, you found yourself so, so terribly wrong about one thing: that you understood at all what was happening.

Deploying catscii to fly.io

Mar 05, 2023

10 min #rust · #docker · #flyio

Disclaimer:

Because I used to work for fly.io, I still benefit from an employee discount at the time of this writing: I don’t have to pay for anything deployed there for now.

fly.io is still sponsoring me for developing hring, but this isn’t a sponsored post. It’s just a good fit for what we’re doing here, with a generous free tier.

In the previous chapter, we’ve written a Dockerfile to build the catscii service inside Docker. The result is a container image that can be pushed to production!

Setting up a local Ubuntu Server VM

Mar 05, 2023

10 min #ubuntu · #virtualbox

The first step to using Nix to build Rust is to do so without Nix, so that when we finally do, we can feel the difference.

There’s many ways to go about this: everyone has their favorite code editor, base Linux distribution (there’s even a NixOS distribution, which I won’t cover). Some folks like to develop on macOS first, and then build for Linux.

Making our own ping

Sep 27, 2019

4 hours 22 min #networking · #rust · #windows

When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how computers talk to each other.

Reading files the hard way - Part 1 (node.js, C, rust, strace)

Aug 31, 2019

15 min #os · #rust · #c · #strace · #kernel · #linux

Everybody knows how to use files. You just open up File Explorer, the Finder, or a File Manager, and bam - it’s chock-full of files. There’s folders and files as far as the eye can see. It’s a genuine filapalooza. I have never once heard someone complain there were not enough files on their computer.

But what is a file, really? And what does reading a file entail, exactly?

Why is my Rust build so slow?

Dec 30, 2021

36 min #rust · #release-engineering

I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was taking too damn long!

For me, this is a big issue. Because I juggle a lot of things at any given time, and I have less and less time to just hyperfocus on an issue, I try to make my setup as productive as possible.

Day 8 (Advent of Code 2020)

Dec 22, 2020

6 min #rust · #advent-of-code

Time for another Advent of Code 2020 problem!

That one sounds like it’s going to be fun. Our input is pretty much assembly, like this:

nop +0
acc +1
jmp +4
acc +3
jmp -3
acc -99
acc +1
jmp -4
acc +6

So, the first thing we’re going to do is write down some types.

There’s more than one way to approach this problem, but let’s go with this:



A terminal case of Linux

Sep 24, 2021

29 min #rust · #linux

Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s a useless use of cat.

…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just like files, means “the current thing”: